Was he simply on an exploratory mission to find a new route to India? If that’s true, then is that scene that you see in movies where he steps on shore and says “I claim this land in the name of Queen Isabella.” not true? Or did he really expect to conquer India with two boatloads of sailors? Was so little known in Europe about India that Columbus never even had a clue he’d found a new continent? Or maybe the real question is how could Columbus know so little about India that he believed that he’d found it?
He didn’t think he had found “India” as we now know it, but rather an outlying district of “the Indies,” a more general term that embraced all of southern Asia including what is now Indonesia. One of his objectives was also Cipangu, or Japan.
India and the Indies were not well known in Europe at the time, but when Columbus found a bunch of islands inhabited by nearly naked people, he knew very well he was not in India proper or in Japan. He convinced himself that he was in some less civilized archipelago that was not far away from those lands. Whenever the inhabitants told him of some richer land nearby, he believed they were talking of Japan or India and went to check it out. At one point he thought Cuba might be Japan but that didn’t pan out.
If Columbus had actually found himself amongst the high civilizations of the Far East he was prepared to establish trade with them rather than conquer them. Since he found far more primitive peoples, he made the best of things by colonizing Hispaniola and extorting gold from the locals and enslaving them.
Over the course of his four voyages, Columbus remained steadfast to his belief that his discoveries were not far away from the real Indies and that Japan was just over the horizon. Gradually it dawned on everyone else that they were not in Asia but in a completely new continent. The first explorer to make that claim was Amerigo Vespucci (or someone writing in his name), which is why the continents are the Americas and not the Columbias.
I asked this question a while ago and got some good responses. I will try to find it. In short, Columbus was a crackpot in many ways even by the standard of his time. He died not knowing that he ever found a new continent.
He was also wrong about the size of the Earth. Educated people knew damn well that the Earth was round and had a pretty good idea of it’s size. They knew that it was possible, in theory, to reach Asia by sailing west. But since they didn’t about the Americas they assumed that it was just ocean and it wasn’t possible to carry enough supplies (they were right about that). Nobody though Columbus would sail of the edge of the Earth. Columbus thought the world was smaller than it really was. Had North and South America not been there his crew would have starved to death.
My Early US history teacher this semester mentioned that there is some evidence to back the belief that Columbo knew there was a land there. Supposedly he had sailed on fishing vessels off the Grand Banks, and knew of a land mass, but may not have known just exactly what he was seeing.
I don’t know if this is true or not, as the fellow also talked about Roman coins being found in Aztec treasuries.
There is a little monument in Galway, Ireland that commemorates CCs trip from Galway in 1477 that “found sure signs of land beyond the Atlantic.” Wiki says he was on his way to Iceland or the Faro Islands (wherever those are). The veracity of that story is in some doubt but not outside the realm possibility.
I’d have thought Colombus’ plan wasn’t so much to explore as it was to get to someplace valuable first and make a pile of gold out of the rewards. If he’d been in explorer-mode rather than how-do-I-make-a-quick-ducat mode, he’d have gone just that little bit further. Probably.
As I said in the other thread, exploring just for the sake of exploring is pretty much a modern notion. Columbus’ only real interest in his voyages was commercial. His exploration in the West Indies and along the coasts of Central and South America was always directed to finding Japan or China, not to just exploration.
When he was in Panama in 1502, the Indians told him of another ocean on the other side of the mountains. If he had been the curious sort, he could have trekked over there and scooped Balboa by over a decade on the discovery of the Pacific. But he was much too busy extorting gold from the locals to do so.
Silver, behind a peak in Darien …
Are you misquoting Keats, or is that from something else?
In short:[ol]
[li]Discover America[/li][li]???[/li][li]Profit![/li][/ol]
Quick question,
“The indians told him”
How the hell did they tell him? I can’t imagine two languages more far apart than American Indian languages and Spanish. I’m not denying it, just curious about how the hell they communicated. Did they use sign language? It must have been difficult. I wonder if the Indians have even had contact with other cultures that spoke foreign languages…
I dunno, i’ve been in foreign countries before, and it’s difficult. It requires a lot of emotive speaking. Imagine being in Russia if nobody spoke english. You couldn’t even hope to read things.
You get off the ship, smile, and hold up your bare hands: They know you’re friendly. You say a few words, and they know that you don’t speak their language. You point at things and say what they’re called in your language; they point at things and say what they’re called in their language. Once you’ve got a good assortment of nouns, you start pantomiming verbs, and then start putting them together into simple sentences. Eventually (within a few months at worst, if both sides are making an effort at it), you’ll have pieced together some sort of pidgin language that you can both speak.
Years and decades go by and as the pidgin is used in trade, it becomes more and more complex and able to express arbitrary ideas. If it gets taught to children as their first language (common if it is commercially important), it stops being a pidgin and becomes a creole. Centuries go by and the natives rise up in revolt against the masters, but keep the masters’ language as the official language because it’s what the rich and powerful people speak. Decades or centuries later, academics who use terms like “prestige dialect” attempt to get the creole made a second official language.
Or the islands get invaded many times, the creole adapts words from each and progressively sheds grammar, and eventually the result gets called “English”. No academics needed, but you have to go through a period where all of the rulers speak French and/or Latin.
No, but he expected to be able to establish and defend a trading post, or “factory” as they were known at the time. The Portuguese did exactly that in India (Goa) and China (Macao)–by sailing east, of course, not west.
In Goa, the local population was weaker and more divided and the Portuguese were able to establish themselves by force. In Macao, the Ming dynasty offered more formidable opposition and the Portuguese were able to establish themselves only under Chinese sufferance, and they had to pay tribute and play by Chinese rules.
Er, you do know that pre-Columbian America had lots of different peoples speaking different languages, right?
Chronos pretty much has it. Initially it was by sign language; in a fairly short order concepts like “Those people over there have more gold than we do. Why don’t you go look for it over there instead of here” can be communicated.
Once a few of the locals had some vocabulary, the explorers would basically kidnap them and use them as translators for neighboring areas.
There was a tremendous variety of languages in the Americas at the time. Virtually every local group would have been in contact with several other groups that spoke different languages. In western Panama, Columbus was amazed to find that virtually every little chiefdom had its own language. However, neighboring groups surely would have had some kind of lingua franca to communicate in. Traders also evidently came along the coast from as far away as Mexico, so that they must have had some kind of trading language as well.
Paraphrasing, yes:
Darien being Panama, and Cortez an egregious error for Balboa.
Or Keats, being a poet, thought the number of syllables was more important then historical accuracy.
I’ve never heard of much silver in Darien. There was plenty of gold, though, especially at the legendary Espiritu Santo mine at Cana. Columbus founded his colony in western Panama, which was then called Veragua. Balboa crossed in eastern Panama, called Darien.